Conferences are always full of speakers, talks and demos, but Unite feels a little different compared to your usual conferences. Despite the rainy weather, Unite managed to create a very relaxed, casual bar-like atmosphere. The great choices of food and drink helped to keep everybody upbeat, excited and positive outlook on the future. Under the easy going hum of geeky conversation VRFocus attended various talks related to virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR). Unity makes it very clear that they’re intent on creating a creative and safe environment for experimenting and building for immersive futures with their software.
At Unite there were several virtual reality (VR) videogames that weren’t finished, but had all been built in Unity. Many of them were still in the beta or experimental stages, and this wasn’t a problem at all. Instead it seemed to help encourage young developers to try and build a VR game themselves. Young developers would come up to software devs showcasing their videogame and ask questions about the videogame, software and hardware. This face-to-face interactivity and genuine conversation from dev-to-dev must be a great way to inspire and ask for help for anybody attending. The various talks discussed mobile VR, VR for advertising, the future of the market, the technical problems you could face as well as live demonstrations on how to create and build in Unity for VR. Microsoft was keen in explaining how mixed reality (MR) was going to change the game when it came to building or creating for various industries whilst Ubisoft showcased some of the MR videogames they’d been experimenting with – explaining why and how things worked when building for augmented reality (AR) and MR.
Stay tuned to VRFocus to see what was being showcased and see how Unity plans to help provide support for developers planning to build for VR, AR and MR.